Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/424

they may amuse them. There is a good deal of the same thing in the first cabin, and several wives make their husbands very uncomfortable by flirting with the young men. . . . The barber on this ship charges only twelve cents for a shave; the price on all other ships I know anything about is double that amount. . . . The Germans and English have talked of fighting so long that I almost hope they will finally be punished by getting at it. War is so unnecessary, atrocious and wicked that every nation that even talks about it should be punished. . . . This morning we passed an Arab dhow. It was not more than sixty feet long, yet vessels of this type have been sailing these seas for centuries. They have but one sail, and a crew of only four or five men, but they are often entrusted with valuable cargoes. They are stoutly but crudely built, and the one deck is covered with straw thatch. The captain of an Arab dhow has no scientific knowledge of navigation, and no instruments to take the sun, yet he knows the currents and the stars, and makes as good time as modern sailing-ships. Captain Ulrich looked at the dhow through his glass this morning, and said the captain was taking every advantage of wind and current, and that the most able navigator could not do better. Ships of exactly this type were used thousands of years ago, and some I have seen along this coast looked to be fully that old. An Arab dhow has no conveniences whatever, yet they carry passengers as well as freight. Passengers and crew live together under the single roof of thatch, and cook and live in the most primitive manner. If the Arabs are not the dirtiest people in